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On March 8, we will again take to the streets in a world shaken by crises and wars. Against the Far Right of Donald Trump and his allies, with their misogynist and queerphobic policies, and in opposition to other false political alternatives that support capitalism, we raise our banners of socialist, anti-imperialist, and internationalist feminism.
The capitalists want the working class and the broad masses to shoulder the costs of the crisis while the capitalists carry on devastating the planet. We rely on the strength of working-class women, who are part of the majority that keeps the world running in the factories, the countryside, the schools and hospitals, the transportation and communication sectors, and in homes. We are the majority that can relaunch the international class struggle, stop government austerity plans, and conquer all our rights.
We saw it on February 1, when Argentina’s feminist movements marched side by side with queer movements against President Javier Milei. We see this in the mass demonstrations against Germany’s Far Right. We are part of the generation of students who fought for the Palestinian people in the heart of the imperialist powers.
This March 8, we will take to the streets to stop the reactionary offensive by Trump and the big European powers, with their warmongering and imperialist rearmament. We defend the rights of women workers, trans people, and immigrants. For the unity of the international working class, in alliance with all oppressed people in the world!
We invite everyone to demonstrate together with Bread and Roses (Pan y Rosas) this March 8, and to organize in all countries to strengthen socialist and anti-imperialist feminism.
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Against the “Reactionary International”: We Rely on the Strength of Women Workers, Who Keep the World Running
Almost two decades after the beginning of the international capitalist crisis, the world’s governments and big businesses continue their attempts to impose austerity on the working class and the most oppressed and impoverished sectors of society. The complex link between oppression and exploitation is being renewed, with attacks on workers’ rights in the form of labor market and pension reforms that are especially detrimental for women. We see growing precariousness, layoffs, and increased hunger. We see austerity in health care and education, as well as attacks on all of our rights.
More than a century after socialists launched International Women’s Day on March 8, Donald Trump has returned to the presidency of the United States, and our banners are as relevant as ever. Trump intends to strengthen imperialism by reinforcing its most rapacious tendencies as U.S. hegemony declines. He is carrying out this program with Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, and a bench of the most obscene billionaires. His government forms part of the misogynist “reactionary international,” which includes Javier Milei, Nayib Bukele, Viktor Orbán, Georgia Meloni, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Spanish party Vox, among others. Their misogynist and transphobic rhetoric is a reaction to the massive feminist movements and queer mobilizations of the last decade, with which we have won rights in the past. This reactionary international represents the abject link between a profoundly conservative ideology, backed by the churches, and a renewed neoliberal offensive by big capital.
At the same time, the working class is increasingly female, queer, immigrant, and racialized. This is why our feminism maintains that we as women, together with the LBGTQ+ community, can play an enormous role in the class struggle, as is already happening.
In recent years, we have been on the front lines of the international class struggle — from the battles to unionize big corporations in the U.S. to the strike waves in France, against Macron’s pension reform, or in Britain. From the protests against inflation in Belgium to the textile workers’ strikes in Myanmar, women workers have left our mark. We are also the generation that challenged the patriarchal values of decades of neoliberalism — including its so-called progressive variant — and played a leading role in movements like Ni Una Menos, the Green Tide, and Black Lives Matter. We were also a key factor in popular uprisings against oppressive regimes, like the one in Iran inspired by Mahsa Amini or more recently in South Korea.
With this orientation, Bread and Roses is at the forefront of all the struggles for our rights. But these struggles cannot be separated from the battles to end our social system based on exploitation, so we defend an anti-capitalist and revolutionary socialist perspective.
Women, at the vanguard of the international working class, can play a decisive role in the struggle against Trump’s imperialism, his “reactionary international,” and all the capitalists’ attacks on the masses.
These governments rely on plundering the planet’s natural common goods, increasing environmental catastrophes, commodifying the reproduction of life through the savage privatization of social services, and creating ever more precarious working conditions. At the same time, they claim to defend the “traditional family” as the basic cell of society, with its economic function of guaranteeing that a large part of social reproduction is carried out in private. In other words, they rely even more on the care work that in capitalist society is mostly carried out by women. In this way, the state does not guarantee the welfare or social rights of the working class and the masses.
On March 8, we will reject all measures to increase precariousness. We demand jobs for all, with full rights, and the expropriation of companies that threaten layoffs or closures. We do not want to be outsourced, Uber-ized, or informalized. We demand the right to health care, education, work, food, and housing.
For Full Democratic and Social Rights for the Immigrant Population!
Anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy, reinforced by Trump’s return to the White House, particularly affect women workers from Latin America and the Caribbean. Just as they use sexism, queerphobia, and racism to divide the working class, the capitalists use xenophobia to attack our rights and blame the immigrant population for the crisis capitalism has caused. It is mostly women from Latin America, Africa, and Asia who work precariously in the U.S., Europe, and other regions, without any labor rights. In many cases, they are separated from their children and suffer sexual violence.
This is why we support women teachers and healthcare workers in the United States who are being called on by the Far Right to denounce immigrant families, even as they are entrusted with protecting them.
This is also why in Germany we are on the front lines of the demonstrations against the far-right AfD, the party inspired by Nazism and supported by Elon Musk. We also oppose Friedrich Merz and his reactionary plans for deportations. As young women, we are the ones who most reject the conservatives and the Far Right in elections. In the recent vote, Bread and Roses, via our candidates Inés Heider in Berlin and Leonie Lieb in Munich, presented a program that can be implemented with the strikes and demonstrations to come: for the right of all immigrants to stay, against war, and also for the expropriation of billionaires. We are for the right to legal, safe, and free abortion, among other points.
As Bread and Roses, we fight for wage equality between men and women, just as we fight for equality between immigrants and native-born, and between white and Black people, as well as for full political and residency rights for all immigrants.
Against the Transphobic Offensive: For Trans Rights!
The transphobic crusade against so-called gender ideology is based on the false idea of protecting white cis women from trans people. In practice, the state denies the existence of trans people, and when the Right is on the advance, it restricts the right to gender transitions, interrupts medical treatments, and even modifies passports and other identity documents. In addition, Trump now wants to deny visas to trans people.
That is why Bread and Roses, together with other groups, helped launch the greatest demonstration of strength in this decade: on May 5, 2024, together with feminist, union, and political organizations, we brought together 25,000 people for a day of action in 50 cities across France and Belgium. In Argentina, after President Milei made transphobic and homophobic comments at the World Economic Forum in Davos, more than 1 million people took to the streets across the country on February 1, with important blocs of Bread and Roses together with congresswoman Myriam Bregman and Buenos Aires legislator Andrea D’Atri, leaders of our group and also of the Party of Socialist Workers (PTS) in the Workers Left Front (FIT).
As Bread and Roses, we took to the streets together with the queer movement to march against Trump and his allies. We fought for comprehensive health care for trans people, including hormone therapy and surgeries for those who want it. This is part of the struggle for public health care, run by healthcare workers and patients.
We Say: Not One Cent for Their Wars! Stop the Genocide against the Palestine People!
Milei’s chainsaw plan can only be explained by his profound subordination to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). We must take to the streets to stop their austerity plans. We call for the nonpayment of the fraudulent public debt, which serves only imperialism and the big international banks. In the same spirit, fighting the austerity plans of the European Right means confronting the imperialist governments that increase the budgets for armies and border agencies while cutting back on health care and education.
Above all, we denounce the sinister role of U.S. and European imperialism in their political and financial support for the genocide in Palestine. Of the tens of thousands of people killed in Gaza, 70 percent have been women and children, murdered with the support of Biden/Harris and EU imperialism. The current ceasefire, which came after the complete destruction of Gaza — and even now, Israeli bombardments and incursions into Gaza, the West Bank, and other Palestinian areas continue — is a result of the moral strength of the Palestinian people, including Palestinian women, who have spent their lives resisting the powerful occupying army. This occupation has been maintained with bombardments and expulsions, which have made the lives of Palestinian women extremely challenging, even in times of peace. In the last year, the strength of the Palestinian people has joined forces with a young generation in the core countries that has risen up against their own imperialist governments, denouncing their collaboration with Zionism. We are the same generation that is leading the feminist uprisings all over the world!
On June 18, our comrade Anasse Kazib, a railway worker of Moroccan origin in France, and another comrade of Révolution Permanente will be tried by the French imperialist courts for pro-Palestinian tweets. We demand that all charges against them be dropped, as well as all charges against anyone who is a victim of repression and criminalization that aims to silence solidarity with Palestine.
Bread and Roses took to the streets for an end to the genocide in Palestine and all military interventions there, and for the right of resistance and national self-determination for the Palestinian people. We will continue to fight for a free, socialist, workers’ Palestine, where Arabs and Jews can live together, and for the end of all oppression.
There Is No Feminist Capitalism!
The capitalist crisis has called into question the idea that our rights will be gradually expanded. It has degraded the democracies for the rich and strengthened Bonapartist tendencies. In this context, the capitalists and their traditional politicians have reinforced the neoliberal idea that socially oppressed groups deserve a quota of representation in the halls of power, both in the state and in big business. Amazon is a case in point: Jeff Bezos used to offer demagoguery about diversity and inclusion programs in his company, and has now joined the billionaires’ bloc that supports Trump. In the context of a major capitalist crisis, these are the traps of “progressive neoliberalism” and “pinkwashing,” which promise us a “more humane capitalism.”
In his first presidency, Trump opposed the “corporate feminism” of Hillary Clinton, the candidate of the Democratic Party. This time, however, his policies were prefigured by Biden-Harris. Trump defeated the first Black vice president running for the presidency. The dead end of neoliberal representation found its maximum expression in the fact that this simulation of “progressivism,” with a less brutal rhetoric than Trump’s, defended the same imperialist and warmongering policy that we are used to from the Democratic Party. It was under this administration that Roe v. Wade was overturned, opening the doors to the prohibition of abortion in many U.S. states. The Democrats also supported the State of Israel in its campaign to exterminate Gaza. As the graveyard of social movements, the Democratic Party has acted to channel all the radicalism expressed on the streets toward the institutions.
In the Spanish State, the government of Pedro Sánchez and the PSOE is carrying out a policy of imperialist rearmament and pacts with Northern African countries to repress migrants. This government has bypassed the powerful feminist movement, which expressed itself with a historic women’s strike on March 8, 2018, restricting the demands of women and the queer movement to stop patriarchal violence to the horizon of the institutions of criminal law. Nonetheless, precarious, immigrant, student, and working-class women continue to organize themselves, call for strikes, and mobilize.
In France, faced with the historic rise of the Far Right, the strategy of the New Popular Front — an alliance of many political and union organizations with the historic Socialist Party — has revealed its powerlessness. In the context of an unprecedented crisis of the regime, the ultra-authoritarian and repressive Macron government is relying on the Socialist Party to implement the Far Right’s program.
Multilateralism Is Not an Alternative for Women Workers
In the face of Trump and his cronies’ misogynist reactionary international, other international powers are trying to position themselves as an alternative. Russia, with its reactionary role in the Ukraine war (in a battle with the right-wing Zelenskyy government and NATO’s imperialist interests), has a political regime that maintains that domestic violence should not necessarily be rejected or considered a crime, and it brutally persecutes queer people with prison sentences and other medieval punishments.
The former deformed workers states, now transformed into capitalist powers, such as China, inherited their conservatism from the reactionary Stalinist regimes. Stalinism persecuted the Left Opposition with prison, exile, and monstrous crimes. It was a reaction to feminist gains of the October Revolution of 1917, when women had conquered rights that were still unimaginable for the most advanced countries of today. Now, more than a century later in degraded capitalist democracies, we are still fighting to win some of the rights gained by women in 1917. Post-Stalinist states are not an alternative for women fighting for our emancipation, nor for the working class confronting exploitation in the context of Western capitalism’s crisis.
Latin American “Progressivism”: Austerity and Attacks on Abortion Rights
In Latin America, where only a minority of the people who can get pregnant have access to abortion, and where nine women are murdered every day as victims of femicide, we say that the state is responsible. The state is responsible when it denies the right to abortion, as it does in Lula’s Brazil, in Boric’s Chile, in Maduro’s Venezuela, or in multiple provinces of Sheinbaum’s Mexico. Several of these governments have spoken out against the right to abortion, in alliance with the churches. In Bolivia, where Evo Morales’s MAS represented one of the most important bastions of Latin American “progressivism,” the conquests of the women’s movement are under attack, even as the Far Right has kept advancing since the coup d’état of 2019. This is a result of the enormous concessions made by Morales and Luis Arce Catacora. In Venezuela, under terrible sanctions by imperialism, Maduro’s authoritarian government attacks all those who question him, sending women to prison, sometimes along with their children and partners. In Argentina, Milei’s ability to govern is sustained by Peronism, the main opposition force. While in office, the Peronists worked to institutionalize the feminist movement, while applying their own austerity program. This is what opened the way for the far-right chainsaw president.
The state is also responsible when its austerity plans limit access to sex education, contraceptives, and high-quality health care. The different shades of so-called progressivism in Latin America today demonstrate that feminism, when conceived as a policy of the capitalist state, is a dead end. This progressivism is supposed to be a “lesser evil” compared to the Right — while its own austerity plans push working people into the Right’s arms.
On March 8, we demand the right to make our own decisions about our bodies. We call for the separation of church and state. We want sex education; quality contraceptives so we don’t need to abort; and legal, safe, and free abortion so we don’t die. Against the violence that takes the lives of tens of thousands of women every year, all over the world, we demand the implementation of emergency plans paid for by nonpayment of the public debts of dependent countries. Not one more cent for the bankers, and not one cent less for the fight against sexist and queerphobic violence. Bread and Roses fights to put an end to all patriarchal and sexist violence, from an anti-carceral perspective. If they touch one of us, we will organize thousands!
Build a Revolutionary Socialist Feminism!
Bread and Roses is an international feminist-socialist tendency, led by the parties that make up the international La Izquierda Diario network (including Left Voice) and the Trotskyist Fraction — Fourth International (TF-FI). We are organized in factories, schools, hospitals, private workplaces, public employers, universities, and neighborhoods in 14 countries of South America, Central America, North America, Europe, and Asia.
Bread and Roses helps publish theoretical weeklies, radio programs, streaming video, TV, magazines, books, and debates with intellectuals and feminist activists from other traditions and tendencies. We help organize cultural centers and other initiatives with a revolutionary Marxist perspective. We participate in the political life of our countries, running candidates in elections on the lists of the working-class, socialist Left, which is politically independent of the bosses’ parties.
We participate in feminist, women’s, and queer movements in our countries, fighting to provide all of their struggles with a strategy to win. This is contrary to the bureaucracies of the unions or social movements, which use our struggles and our demands to strengthen the capitalist governments and political regimes in crisis, to which they submit themselves. The bureaucrats want to prevent our fighting energy in every mobilization, strike, and uprising from opening the path to social revolution.
There is no definitive emancipation of women and all oppressed people if we do not change this system at its roots and fight for a communist society, free of exploitation and oppression.
We invite everyone to demonstrate together with Bread and Roses on March 8, and to organize with us, to continue building a socialist and anti-imperialist feminist movement all around the world!